Who is an elected or public official, and who can sign-up?
It’s best to illustrate this with some non-exhaustive examples:
Elected Official
- School District Officials (e.g. school board member, superintendent)
- Special District Representatives (e.g. water board members)
- City (e.g. council member, mayor, alderman)
- County / Parish / Borough (e.g., commissioner, supervisor)
- State (e.g., governor, state legislator, state senator)
Public Official
- Non-elected leadership (e.g., city clerk, city manager)
- Executives of districts (e.g., county chief executives)
- County Public Agencies (e.g., county parks and recs department)
Public Officials have the option to sign-up as their department/agency and post as such. Elected Officials will always post under their own name.
How is this different from other social media platforms?
Trust & transparency are the foundation for effective and genuine civic engagement. Therefore, some features of CivicBell are fundamentally different from traditional social media platforms:
- Only elected and public officials can post in the main feed, the CivicFeed — residents are limited to participating in survey or in discussion boards that officials open.
- Residents, elected, and public officials have verified identities — while we do allow some degree of anonymity, this ensures one account per one person and that this person has a connection to you as their elected or public officials (e.g. the user is a resident in your constituency).
- Elected and public officials control the level of engagement — e.g., if you only want to post an update without a big discussion then you can deactivate the comment feature, or if you only want to hear from your high school constituents you can filter to only see their responses in your survey dashboard.
Can I create a profile as a candidate?
We are not an election platform. CivicBell is a tool for civic and political deliberation and thus aimed towards elected and public officials in office and their constituents. That being said, we are working on something cool in this space — stay tuned!
Are you following all legal requirements such as ADA, Brown Act, etc.?
Yes. We are, to the best of our knowledge and belief, following all local, state, and federal mandates. This includes federal requirements such as the Americans with Disabilities Act to local requirements such as the California “Brown” Act. We also follow public records requirements and data protection requirements, such as GDPR, CCPA, etc.
That being said, if you notice any irregularities we kindly ask you to inform us of those via legal@civicbell.com. Thank you!